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ところでなぜプラム博物館？？？
Days of spam and halibut
Michael Palin's oddball wit, gentle manner and unflappable good humour have endeared him to a worldwide audience that has hung on his every word, from the Lumberjack Song to Himalaya. As he publishes his diaries from the Monty Python era, he entertains Patrick French. Photograph by Juries Broad
Shortly before Monty Python's Flying Circus started its first road tour in 1973, the six Pythons had an elaborate lunch at Rules, London's oldest restaurant. Their publisher had placed silly menus on the table, and sketch related memo including sugar Gumbies and a chocolate replica of the giant hedgehog, Spiny Norman.
'Here we were, being given an enormous and expensive free meal, in honour of us earning large amounts of money,' Michael Palin wrote in his diary that night. ‘I can't help feeling that Python is better employed creating than celebrating.'
Thirty three years later, I am having lunch with Palin at Rules, and he is still creating. Around us sit florid men in pinstripe suits and a few pneumatic women. Dressed in his customary blue shirt, his eyes crinkling, Palin looks good for 63. He is an uneasy heart-throb, though when groupies started to proposition him m the early days of Python, he found it 'altogether most disturbing.
He has always seemed the most normal of the Pythons, and he metamorphosed happily in the 1990s into a popular and endlessly curious television traveller. He is in the middle of filming another journey, this time through Eastern Europe, is writing a book about it and is just about to publish his first volume of diaries, covering the Python years. His humour is instinctive, part of how he reacts to the world. 'I'll have the wild halibut: he says to the waitress. 'A tame halibut would be no use; and goes off on a Pythonic riff about a pet halibut. The foreign waitress does not understand, but is soon laughing, the joke apparent from Ins expressions and gestures, 'She had a very good French accent,' he says when she goes.
Watching clips from early Python shows, I am surprised by how funny they still are, 'The humour is more surreal and iconoclastic than anything currently on British television, and some way ahead of the stylised, repetitive humour of Little Britain. The philosophers' football match, for example, is a masterpiece, with Socrates scoring a goal, Hegel disputing it and Nietzsche being booked for arguing with the referee.
Why does Palin think Monty Python was so successful? ''We produced something with Python that we were not able to replicate, though it was revived in the films. It was a fireball that blazed while it was there... I don't know where the material came from. For me, a lot came from my education, from my schooldays. I would watch teachers meticulously, how they talked, how they walked.' The achievement stemmed from the unlikely combustion of six people, each with a distinctive comic talent.
I have met Michael Palin before. Last year, I interviewed him about Ins Himalayan TV series at the Salisbury Festival, and observed his obliging tolerance towards his many fans. On stage he was easygoing, although a powerful professional dedication under lay his anecdote& When he told a story about having to sing the Lumberjack Song m German, a voice from the audience shouted, 'Let's hear it,' and, without missing a beat, he sang the first verse, in German. Discussing Himalaya, I asked if he might like to recreate a scene in a village divided by the Indo Burmese border. With no hesitation, he bounded from one end of the stage to the other, putting one foot in India and the next in Burma, even doing boyish press ups with Ins hands in India and Ins toes m Burma.
Signing books afterwards, he was remarkably even tempered. When a geeky youth produced a stack of Monty Python DVDs, he took out a special felt tip pen and signed each box individually, readily answering arcane questions about particular sketches. Some of his admirers were too overwhelmed to do anything but gaze One said, 'Please would you sign "To Amanda, who is very excited",' and proceeded to jump up and down on the spot like a breathless child.
When the queue finally died down, he was confronted by a man with an angry manner. 'Michael, you've put the wrong date in my book, you've put 2003 instead of 2005!' In his expressive, distinctive voice Palin responded with a joke about the book now being more valuable, but the accession wasn't having any of it. And Palin wrote out a new, cheerful, apologetic dedication.
ところでなぜプラム博物館？？？
Days of spam and halibut
Michael Palin's oddball wit, gentle manner and unflappable good humour have endeared him to a worldwide audience that has hung on his every word, from the Lumberjack Song to Himalaya. As he publishes his diaries from the Monty Python era, he entertains Patrick French. Photograph by Juries Broad
Shortly before Monty Python's Flying Circus started its first road tour in 1973, the six Pythons had an elaborate lunch at Rules, London's oldest restaurant. Their publisher had placed silly menus on the table, and sketch related memo including sugar Gumbies and a chocolate replica of the giant hedgehog, Spiny Norman.
'Here we were, being given an enormous and expensive free meal, in honour of us earning large amounts of money,' Michael Palin wrote in his diary that night. ‘I can't help feeling that Python is better employed creating than celebrating.'
Thirty three years later, I am having lunch with Palin at Rules, and he is still creating. Around us sit florid men in pinstripe suits and a few pneumatic women. Dressed in his customary blue shirt, his eyes crinkling, Palin looks good for 63. He is an uneasy heart-throb, though when groupies started to proposition him m the early days of Python, he found it 'altogether most disturbing.
He has always seemed the most normal of the Pythons, and he metamorphosed happily in the 1990s into a popular and endlessly curious television traveller. He is in the middle of filming another journey, this time through Eastern Europe, is writing a book about it and is just about to publish his first volume of diaries, covering the Python years. His humour is instinctive, part of how he reacts to the world. 'I'll have the wild halibut: he says to the waitress. 'A tame halibut would be no use; and goes off on a Pythonic riff about a pet halibut. The foreign waitress does not understand, but is soon laughing, the joke apparent from Ins expressions and gestures, 'She had a very good French accent,' he says when she goes.
Watching clips from early Python shows, I am surprised by how funny they still are, 'The humour is more surreal and iconoclastic than anything currently on British television, and some way ahead of the stylised, repetitive humour of Little Britain. The philosophers' football match, for example, is a masterpiece, with Socrates scoring a goal, Hegel disputing it and Nietzsche being booked for arguing with the referee.
Why does Palin think Monty Python was so successful? ''We produced something with Python that we were not able to replicate, though it was revived in the films. It was a fireball that blazed while it was there... I don't know where the material came from. For me, a lot came from my education, from my schooldays. I would watch teachers meticulously, how they talked, how they walked.' The achievement stemmed from the unlikely combustion of six people, each with a distinctive comic talent.
I have met Michael Palin before. Last year, I interviewed him about Ins Himalayan TV series at the Salisbury Festival, and observed his obliging tolerance towards his many fans. On stage he was easygoing, although a powerful professional dedication under lay his anecdote& When he told a story about having to sing the Lumberjack Song m German, a voice from the audience shouted, 'Let's hear it,' and, without missing a beat, he sang the first verse, in German. Discussing Himalaya, I asked if he might like to recreate a scene in a village divided by the Indo Burmese border. With no hesitation, he bounded from one end of the stage to the other, putting one foot in India and the next in Burma, even doing boyish press ups with Ins hands in India and Ins toes m Burma.
Signing books afterwards, he was remarkably even tempered. When a geeky youth produced a stack of Monty Python DVDs, he took out a special felt tip pen and signed each box individually, readily answering arcane questions about particular sketches. Some of his admirers were too overwhelmed to do anything but gaze One said, 'Please would you sign "To Amanda, who is very excited",' and proceeded to jump up and down on the spot like a breathless child.
When the queue finally died down, he was confronted by a man with an angry manner. 'Michael, you've put the wrong date in my book, you've put 2003 instead of 2005!' In his expressive, distinctive voice Palin responded with a joke about the book now being more valuable, but the accession wasn't having any of it. And Palin wrote out a new, cheerful, apologetic dedication.
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Does he ever snap? Palin-followers apparently keep a bootleg recording of him losing his temper with a pair of sardonic student journalists Pythonically, he left them m his own house 'I walked out and slammed the door. I was under a lot of pressure... People keep telling me I have the best job in the world. On Annapurna, I was going up a very steep bit of the path with stone steps, in a very distressed state. I got to the top and heard two women talking and one of them suddenly noticed me, nudged her friend and said, "Look", so I pulled myself up to my full height, stopped coughing, and sauntered by looking as cool as I could, and I beard her say to her friend, "Oh my God! It's Eric Idle!"'
He doesn't remember when the Pythons met for the first time. 'We all knew each other from writing for Marty Feldman and David Frost, or The Two Ronnies.' Did he imagine he would have a career in comedy? 'Absolutely not. I was just trying to avoid getting the kind of job my parents expected.' For Palin, who had grown up on the posh side of Sheffield and been sent to boarding school before going to university at Oxford, absurd humour became a means to escape post war convention.
'We had a strong feeling that we had to produce something different. We thought about doing a show with a stream of consciousness. If we had three minutes of a good sketch, we could use Terry [Gilliam's animations] to take us on to the next one. The BBC didn't understand it at all.' Palin hoped 'to shake the awful complacency of people in England I thought, you cat rotten food, you have intolerant opinions, you never show your emotions and you are so pleased about it. I'm a great admirer of many things about the English, but I don't like narrowness. I've always hated rules.' He pauses, and adds, 'Not the restaurant.'
After lunch, we walk to a building on the edge of Covent Garden, where a sign reveals it to be the registered office of outfits including Prominent Palin Productions Ltd, Fish Productions and Gumby Corporation Ltd. His various incarnations travel shows, representation and busy travel website are organised from here. The people in the office treat him with informal reverence. 'I've been with Michael since 1979,' one says. 'Good luck to you,' says another, realising I am doing an interview. 'Nobody's found the truth about Michael Palin. Can you crack him?' Palin rolls his eyes.
'I don't really like talking about myself,' he says. He will talk about anything quite happily, but has no wish to dissect his own achievements. This is partly because he lacks arrogance, but also because he seems reluctant to dig at the roots of something that works: his talent is fight on its feet, and he has no wish to expose it. Like PG Wodehouse, he writes fluently and fast, and seems a long way from the defensive, tormented humourist, like John Cleese, or the tormentor, like Peter Sellers.
Despite having no formal training as an actor, Palin moved easily from Monty Python to starring as the foolish hero of Roping Yarns comedies such as Tomkinson's Schooldays, which he co wrote with Terry Jones, and acting in movies such as Brazil and A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won a Bafta. His travel shows started in 1989 with Around the World in 80 Days. 'The BBC said I was the only person who could do it. Only in Madras, when our ship ran aground, did the director admit I was their fourth choice. Noel Edmonds was the third, but he chose Mr Blobby instead. As I was doing it, I felt a bit like I did with the first Pythons. I thought, who's going to watch this? I've never had an agenda of any kind at all. I've been rather impulsive and intuitive about things.'
In his diaries (which he reduced from 1.2 million words to 250,000 for publication), he examines the practicalities of his life and career, but usually avoids the introspective. There are moments of intimacy: his concern, for Eve Levinson, a friend who failed and then managed to kill herself, and his care for his difficult father, who declines and dies over the course of the book. As a diarist, he lacks the sly eye and social insecurity of Alan Bennett or Kenneth Williams, which can make the entries innocuous. His tone is affable and understanding; he is innately liberal, with an eye for the absurd. He comes across as a conciliatory force within Python, stabilising the mercurial talent of Clew and his writing partner Graham Chapman.
He doesn't remember when the Pythons met for the first time. 'We all knew each other from writing for Marty Feldman and David Frost, or The Two Ronnies.' Did he imagine he would have a career in comedy? 'Absolutely not. I was just trying to avoid getting the kind of job my parents expected.' For Palin, who had grown up on the posh side of Sheffield and been sent to boarding school before going to university at Oxford, absurd humour became a means to escape post war convention.
'We had a strong feeling that we had to produce something different. We thought about doing a show with a stream of consciousness. If we had three minutes of a good sketch, we could use Terry [Gilliam's animations] to take us on to the next one. The BBC didn't understand it at all.' Palin hoped 'to shake the awful complacency of people in England I thought, you cat rotten food, you have intolerant opinions, you never show your emotions and you are so pleased about it. I'm a great admirer of many things about the English, but I don't like narrowness. I've always hated rules.' He pauses, and adds, 'Not the restaurant.'
After lunch, we walk to a building on the edge of Covent Garden, where a sign reveals it to be the registered office of outfits including Prominent Palin Productions Ltd, Fish Productions and Gumby Corporation Ltd. His various incarnations travel shows, representation and busy travel website are organised from here. The people in the office treat him with informal reverence. 'I've been with Michael since 1979,' one says. 'Good luck to you,' says another, realising I am doing an interview. 'Nobody's found the truth about Michael Palin. Can you crack him?' Palin rolls his eyes.
'I don't really like talking about myself,' he says. He will talk about anything quite happily, but has no wish to dissect his own achievements. This is partly because he lacks arrogance, but also because he seems reluctant to dig at the roots of something that works: his talent is fight on its feet, and he has no wish to expose it. Like PG Wodehouse, he writes fluently and fast, and seems a long way from the defensive, tormented humourist, like John Cleese, or the tormentor, like Peter Sellers.
Despite having no formal training as an actor, Palin moved easily from Monty Python to starring as the foolish hero of Roping Yarns comedies such as Tomkinson's Schooldays, which he co wrote with Terry Jones, and acting in movies such as Brazil and A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won a Bafta. His travel shows started in 1989 with Around the World in 80 Days. 'The BBC said I was the only person who could do it. Only in Madras, when our ship ran aground, did the director admit I was their fourth choice. Noel Edmonds was the third, but he chose Mr Blobby instead. As I was doing it, I felt a bit like I did with the first Pythons. I thought, who's going to watch this? I've never had an agenda of any kind at all. I've been rather impulsive and intuitive about things.'
In his diaries (which he reduced from 1.2 million words to 250,000 for publication), he examines the practicalities of his life and career, but usually avoids the introspective. There are moments of intimacy: his concern, for Eve Levinson, a friend who failed and then managed to kill herself, and his care for his difficult father, who declines and dies over the course of the book. As a diarist, he lacks the sly eye and social insecurity of Alan Bennett or Kenneth Williams, which can make the entries innocuous. His tone is affable and understanding; he is innately liberal, with an eye for the absurd. He comes across as a conciliatory force within Python, stabilising the mercurial talent of Clew and his writing partner Graham Chapman.
Did he avoid exposing the conflicts in his diaries? 'There wasn't a lot of conflict. Sometimes you would get John Cleese at one end of the table, taking a lofty, English approach, like a lawyer, resisting the idea that we should be creating a new kind of comedy. He is a real perfectionist. Terry Jones would have a passionate, almost Welsh view, saying there should be more disorder, and Terry Gilliam and I would usually agree. Most of the difficulties were down to lifestyle rather than the humour about where we should work, whether we should all go to Barbados to write Graham was sometimes drunk during our stage performances, but I don't think he was ever drunk during the writing.'
Chapman, who died from cancer in 1989, is a fascinating presence m the diaries, brilliant and impossible, frequently inebriated and keenly homosexual in an era of discretion. One diary entry has him being seduced by a man on a fishing holiday in a remote hotel in Scotland while filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and later waking up a stoned Palin in the middle of the night to claim he is Ethel do Geyser, the anti apartheid activist.
'Graham looked most conventional. He was at all camp. You would see him wearing a jacket, smoking a pipe and doing the Telegraph crossword. But he had a lot of young friends and a very extrovert lifestyle.' Cleese found this hard to cope with. 'John was always one to keep an eye on the watch. saying, "It's 3.23, I have to go in seven minutes." Graham was so different from John, and it became very frustrating for him. It was almost as if they were cursed by being able to write wonderfully funny sketches together.’ Did Cleese resent it?' John felt he got there on time and wrote 90 per cent of the material, but often Graham's 10 per cent had the jewels. The real bankers like the dead parrot and the cheese shop were Cleese and Chapman.'
Palin feels in retrospect that he failed to appreciate quite how serious John Cleese was about his other interest: making business training films. 'I kept thinking, John has been so brilliant in Python, why does he want to rein in his talents by making films about how to chair a meeting or run a business? I underestimated his view of life, his need to do things he thought were productive. I was trying to impose on John what I wanted for hint.'
Palin seems fascinated by the contradictions of Cleese, the hectoring authority figure whose comic genius could not help but escape 'John was trying to sort out his own fife all this time He was always in therapy of some kind. My view is that John drove his therapists mad.'
Palin wrote in partnership with Terry Jones, a friend from his Oxford days. 'Writing Python, we would come up with a one line idea for example, a Viking army arriving and go off and write something, read it out and halfway through you might think, this is absolute crap, and the other person would say, no you can turn it round, like this.' Did he know what was going to work? 'Not always. Take the Lumberjack Song. Terry and I were doing this thing about a barber who was obviously a psychopath and who shouldn't be allowed near anything sharp. We didn't know where it was going. I said, maybe he just goes crazy and says, I don't want to be a barber anyway, I want to be a lumberjack. It was five to six, and normally at six we would stop and go to the pub. We kept going, didn't go to the pub and by twenty past six we had written all the words of the Lumberjack Song. Nobody thought people were going to be singing it 30 or 40 years later.'
Chapman, who died from cancer in 1989, is a fascinating presence m the diaries, brilliant and impossible, frequently inebriated and keenly homosexual in an era of discretion. One diary entry has him being seduced by a man on a fishing holiday in a remote hotel in Scotland while filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and later waking up a stoned Palin in the middle of the night to claim he is Ethel do Geyser, the anti apartheid activist.
'Graham looked most conventional. He was at all camp. You would see him wearing a jacket, smoking a pipe and doing the Telegraph crossword. But he had a lot of young friends and a very extrovert lifestyle.' Cleese found this hard to cope with. 'John was always one to keep an eye on the watch. saying, "It's 3.23, I have to go in seven minutes." Graham was so different from John, and it became very frustrating for him. It was almost as if they were cursed by being able to write wonderfully funny sketches together.’ Did Cleese resent it?' John felt he got there on time and wrote 90 per cent of the material, but often Graham's 10 per cent had the jewels. The real bankers like the dead parrot and the cheese shop were Cleese and Chapman.'
Palin feels in retrospect that he failed to appreciate quite how serious John Cleese was about his other interest: making business training films. 'I kept thinking, John has been so brilliant in Python, why does he want to rein in his talents by making films about how to chair a meeting or run a business? I underestimated his view of life, his need to do things he thought were productive. I was trying to impose on John what I wanted for hint.'
Palin seems fascinated by the contradictions of Cleese, the hectoring authority figure whose comic genius could not help but escape 'John was trying to sort out his own fife all this time He was always in therapy of some kind. My view is that John drove his therapists mad.'
Palin wrote in partnership with Terry Jones, a friend from his Oxford days. 'Writing Python, we would come up with a one line idea for example, a Viking army arriving and go off and write something, read it out and halfway through you might think, this is absolute crap, and the other person would say, no you can turn it round, like this.' Did he know what was going to work? 'Not always. Take the Lumberjack Song. Terry and I were doing this thing about a barber who was obviously a psychopath and who shouldn't be allowed near anything sharp. We didn't know where it was going. I said, maybe he just goes crazy and says, I don't want to be a barber anyway, I want to be a lumberjack. It was five to six, and normally at six we would stop and go to the pub. We kept going, didn't go to the pub and by twenty past six we had written all the words of the Lumberjack Song. Nobody thought people were going to be singing it 30 or 40 years later.'
The next morning, I go to Gospel Oak in north London, with its leafy streets, Georgian houses and posters appealing for the return of a lost pedigree cat. Michael Palin and his wife Helen live in the same house in which they brought up their three children. It has grown a little over the years; they bought the house next door, and then the one next door to that, and knocked them through. His diaries mention that when Life of Brian started to make money, his friend George Harrison (who funded the film, the original backers having taken fright) suggested it was tune for Palin to buy a mansion. His reply: 'I'm really happy where I am.'
Palin has always been resolutely uninterested in the glamour and hedonism that fame offers. A diary entry from 1978 in New York finds him at a party given by Truman Capote and Andy Warhol at Studio 54, which he refers to as 'the fashionable disco'. Palin does not feel at home, and is troubled by the noise, the broken glasses and the press of bodies. The presence of such luminaries as Mick Jogger, Salvador ball and Breaks Shields, who has just starred as the child prostitute in Pretty Baby, do little for him. His closing line is touching: 'I found it horribly depressing almost a nightmare, and was relieved when we left just before one'
Famous faces of the 1970s course through the diaries: the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys; even a Alan Bennett makes a brief appearance, in character. When Bennett spots Chapman 'at his most baroque', fondling Terry Jones, in the dressing room before they go on stage, he shakes his head and murmurs, 'Oh dear. We never used to do that sort of thing. We never used to touch each other' The Goodies pop up, too. Chapman is seen at a BBC party, very drunk, wearing a T shirt saying 'Bill Addie'. Later, Palin and Jones spot the Goodies walking in Hampstead wearing identical blue anoraks, and take pleasure 'shouting loud and coarsely after them, "Goodies!" "Eric Cleese!" "Do us your silly walk!" and watching them deliberately not turn around or quicken their pace,' Palin admits there was 'general scorn for the Goodies among the Pythons', before adding, 'Though I knew them and got on with all of them.'
The only contemporary comedian for whom Palin has firm admiration although they have not met is Chris Morris, the satirist who created The Day Today and Brass Eye.’ I like The Office, Green Wing, The Fast Show, Little Britain: they all make me laugh. But I know what's going to happen. A programme like Brass Eye takes my breath away because Chris Morris decided to create something completely different. It's a leap into the unknown.'
Palin's diaries track the rapid rise of Monty Python's Flying Circus after it was first broadcast late at night on BBC television. In 1971, doing a stage show in Coventry, he was amazed to find members of the audience dressed as characters from the sketches, busily shouting out lines before he had a chance to say them himself. 'It was a strange kind of hysteria for a comedy show to create; he wrote. Going back to their hotel, the Pythons encountered 'half a dozen grown men with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads disappearing down the road in front of us.'
By 1978, with the series having enjoyed huge success in the US, Michael Palin was guest-presenting Saturday Night Live, broadcast coast-to coast on NBC. It was one of his worst moments, 'monumentally awful'. In a thoroughly un American way, he proposed doing a dance to the White Cliffs of Dover while putting seafood salad and two cats down his trousers. All went well in rehearsal, but in the heat of the night one of the cats took fright, slim all over him and escaped. He was left 'stroking the other one's little marmalade head as it peeked out of my trousers. I caught sight of myself on the monitor and it looked night marishly obscene. But the red fight of the camera shone unblinkingly at me revealing to the entire US a man who looked as if he was masturbating with an arm covered in shit.' He rushed to change into the costume of a Roman Catholic priest, and found himself in a confessional box staring at ban Aykroyd of the Blues Brothers. ' I saw him looking at me in a way, as if to say, I knew Michael would be nervous, but not this badly.' Only after the show did Palin learn from the producer that he had been a wild success. The camera had been too distant from the erupting cat for anyone watching to realise what was happening. It looked tremendous; and there is no smell on television.
Palin has always been resolutely uninterested in the glamour and hedonism that fame offers. A diary entry from 1978 in New York finds him at a party given by Truman Capote and Andy Warhol at Studio 54, which he refers to as 'the fashionable disco'. Palin does not feel at home, and is troubled by the noise, the broken glasses and the press of bodies. The presence of such luminaries as Mick Jogger, Salvador ball and Breaks Shields, who has just starred as the child prostitute in Pretty Baby, do little for him. His closing line is touching: 'I found it horribly depressing almost a nightmare, and was relieved when we left just before one'
Famous faces of the 1970s course through the diaries: the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys; even a Alan Bennett makes a brief appearance, in character. When Bennett spots Chapman 'at his most baroque', fondling Terry Jones, in the dressing room before they go on stage, he shakes his head and murmurs, 'Oh dear. We never used to do that sort of thing. We never used to touch each other' The Goodies pop up, too. Chapman is seen at a BBC party, very drunk, wearing a T shirt saying 'Bill Addie'. Later, Palin and Jones spot the Goodies walking in Hampstead wearing identical blue anoraks, and take pleasure 'shouting loud and coarsely after them, "Goodies!" "Eric Cleese!" "Do us your silly walk!" and watching them deliberately not turn around or quicken their pace,' Palin admits there was 'general scorn for the Goodies among the Pythons', before adding, 'Though I knew them and got on with all of them.'
The only contemporary comedian for whom Palin has firm admiration although they have not met is Chris Morris, the satirist who created The Day Today and Brass Eye.’ I like The Office, Green Wing, The Fast Show, Little Britain: they all make me laugh. But I know what's going to happen. A programme like Brass Eye takes my breath away because Chris Morris decided to create something completely different. It's a leap into the unknown.'
Palin's diaries track the rapid rise of Monty Python's Flying Circus after it was first broadcast late at night on BBC television. In 1971, doing a stage show in Coventry, he was amazed to find members of the audience dressed as characters from the sketches, busily shouting out lines before he had a chance to say them himself. 'It was a strange kind of hysteria for a comedy show to create; he wrote. Going back to their hotel, the Pythons encountered 'half a dozen grown men with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads disappearing down the road in front of us.'
By 1978, with the series having enjoyed huge success in the US, Michael Palin was guest-presenting Saturday Night Live, broadcast coast-to coast on NBC. It was one of his worst moments, 'monumentally awful'. In a thoroughly un American way, he proposed doing a dance to the White Cliffs of Dover while putting seafood salad and two cats down his trousers. All went well in rehearsal, but in the heat of the night one of the cats took fright, slim all over him and escaped. He was left 'stroking the other one's little marmalade head as it peeked out of my trousers. I caught sight of myself on the monitor and it looked night marishly obscene. But the red fight of the camera shone unblinkingly at me revealing to the entire US a man who looked as if he was masturbating with an arm covered in shit.' He rushed to change into the costume of a Roman Catholic priest, and found himself in a confessional box staring at ban Aykroyd of the Blues Brothers. ' I saw him looking at me in a way, as if to say, I knew Michael would be nervous, but not this badly.' Only after the show did Palin learn from the producer that he had been a wild success. The camera had been too distant from the erupting cat for anyone watching to realise what was happening. It looked tremendous; and there is no smell on television.
He says he always had 'a certain resistance' to the US, despite America's importance in the global success of the Monty Python shows and films. Scandinavia and Eastern Europe were its other natural homes, though m Communist countries the subversive humour was viewed as political. 'Eric Idle was the one who knew everyone in New York and Hollywood. It was important to Eric that they were famous. If they were clever and interesting and famous, so much the better. He created a lot of opportunities for us.'
Palin looks thoroughly at home being filmed by a crew from BBC2's The Culture Show. He treats them with a mixture of ease and professionalism as they pad about his sitting room. Although they have been there for only a few minutes, he knows their names. He sits at his desk between books and globes, stares out of the window, opens a drawer and removes his diary, turns back to the desk and starts to write in it. He does this perhaps 20 times, as people move around him. 'Can you lean to the right?' the cameraman asks. 'Would you mind moving the lip balm, Michael?' the producer says, peering at a monitor inside a black bag. Palin obliges. 'There's an awful lot of lip balm on this desk. People will think I have a lip problem.' Being filmed writing his diary is a new experience. He reads out an extract, and adds, 'It's rather like being filmed having it off.. I've always tried to cherish a discreet personal life.'
We go down to the kitchen to make coffee, passing a Python foot and a tin of Spam. He met Helen when he was on holiday, aged 16, and they married in 1966. 'I have never wanted my family to be in the spotlight, nor have they wanted to be. Life at home [in the 1970s] was without great incident, apart from the birth of children that was the attraction of it.'
Does he still see the other Pythons? 'We do see each other. The last time we all got together was on Broadway for Erie Idle's musical, Spamalot. We had to all go up on stage. It was very showbizzy.'
Palin puts the coffee cups on a tray and offers me a plum from a bowl on the table. 'They're very good. A man brings them from the Forest of Dean in a van. The other day he said to me, "What I like most of all is plums. I'm going to start a plum museum, would you be available to open it?" I thought, well, I'll have to, it will be Monty Python coming true. People will say, "What are you doing today, Michael?"' He adopts an important voice. 'I'll have to say, "I'm very busy today, I’m opening a Plum museum. "'
Palin looks thoroughly at home being filmed by a crew from BBC2's The Culture Show. He treats them with a mixture of ease and professionalism as they pad about his sitting room. Although they have been there for only a few minutes, he knows their names. He sits at his desk between books and globes, stares out of the window, opens a drawer and removes his diary, turns back to the desk and starts to write in it. He does this perhaps 20 times, as people move around him. 'Can you lean to the right?' the cameraman asks. 'Would you mind moving the lip balm, Michael?' the producer says, peering at a monitor inside a black bag. Palin obliges. 'There's an awful lot of lip balm on this desk. People will think I have a lip problem.' Being filmed writing his diary is a new experience. He reads out an extract, and adds, 'It's rather like being filmed having it off.. I've always tried to cherish a discreet personal life.'
We go down to the kitchen to make coffee, passing a Python foot and a tin of Spam. He met Helen when he was on holiday, aged 16, and they married in 1966. 'I have never wanted my family to be in the spotlight, nor have they wanted to be. Life at home [in the 1970s] was without great incident, apart from the birth of children that was the attraction of it.'
Does he still see the other Pythons? 'We do see each other. The last time we all got together was on Broadway for Erie Idle's musical, Spamalot. We had to all go up on stage. It was very showbizzy.'
Palin puts the coffee cups on a tray and offers me a plum from a bowl on the table. 'They're very good. A man brings them from the Forest of Dean in a van. The other day he said to me, "What I like most of all is plums. I'm going to start a plum museum, would you be available to open it?" I thought, well, I'll have to, it will be Monty Python coming true. People will say, "What are you doing today, Michael?"' He adopts an important voice. 'I'll have to say, "I'm very busy today, I’m opening a Plum museum. "'
にょろにょろさん、
ええと、簡潔にまとめるのは難しいですが、日記についての補足みたいな内容と、マイケルの近況ですね。
出版に際して日記は120万語から、25万語に減らしたとありますが、本来の日記の約1/5とは。編集も大変だったでしょう。
ヒマラヤでエリックに間違われた話。
The GoodiesがHampstead HeathでEric Cleeseと呼ばれた話。
アメリカのサタデーナイトライブに出演した時に、猫をズボンの中に入れるネタが、リハではうまくいったのに、本番ではスタジオのライトの暑さで猫が一匹逃げ出してしまい、まるで、うxxまみれの手でマスxxxxxxxをしているようにモニターに映って、これが全米に放送されてしまったのかと真っ青になった話。結局は大成功だったそうですが。
ランバージャックソングは、刃物を持っちゃいけない床屋という発想から多分テリーＪが、床屋になりたくなかった、木こりになりたかったという狂った発想をし、それが6時5分前で、普段は6時に終わってパブに行くのだけど、その日は行かないで続け、6時20分には書き終わっていた、この曲が30年後も歌われるとは思わなかった。
さて、プラム博物館の話。このインタビューの日にテーブルの上に置かれていたプラムを売りに来たForest of Deanというところから男が、プラムが大好きで、プラム博物館を開くから、序幕をしてくれないか？と頼まれたということです。
さて、最初の書き込みの中で
"the joke apparent from Ins expressions and gestures"
等に出てくる"Ins"は、どれも"his"の間違いでした。
また、１に出てくる単独の"m"は"in"です。
すみません。
スキャンソフトを使って読み込んだ後校正したつもりでしたが、この部分はすっ飛ばしてしまってたようです。
まだ一部間違ってるかもしれませんのでご了承ください。
ええと、簡潔にまとめるのは難しいですが、日記についての補足みたいな内容と、マイケルの近況ですね。
出版に際して日記は120万語から、25万語に減らしたとありますが、本来の日記の約1/5とは。編集も大変だったでしょう。
ヒマラヤでエリックに間違われた話。
The GoodiesがHampstead HeathでEric Cleeseと呼ばれた話。
アメリカのサタデーナイトライブに出演した時に、猫をズボンの中に入れるネタが、リハではうまくいったのに、本番ではスタジオのライトの暑さで猫が一匹逃げ出してしまい、まるで、うxxまみれの手でマスxxxxxxxをしているようにモニターに映って、これが全米に放送されてしまったのかと真っ青になった話。結局は大成功だったそうですが。
ランバージャックソングは、刃物を持っちゃいけない床屋という発想から多分テリーＪが、床屋になりたくなかった、木こりになりたかったという狂った発想をし、それが6時5分前で、普段は6時に終わってパブに行くのだけど、その日は行かないで続け、6時20分には書き終わっていた、この曲が30年後も歌われるとは思わなかった。
さて、プラム博物館の話。このインタビューの日にテーブルの上に置かれていたプラムを売りに来たForest of Deanというところから男が、プラムが大好きで、プラム博物館を開くから、序幕をしてくれないか？と頼まれたということです。
さて、最初の書き込みの中で
"the joke apparent from Ins expressions and gestures"
等に出てくる"Ins"は、どれも"his"の間違いでした。
また、１に出てくる単独の"m"は"in"です。
すみません。
スキャンソフトを使って読み込んだ後校正したつもりでしたが、この部分はすっ飛ばしてしまってたようです。
まだ一部間違ってるかもしれませんのでご了承ください。
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